The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.98

c15.98

In any case, the relations between Mesopotamian and Indian savants can be presumed to have existed by the mere fact that Persian administration employed in its satrapies and therefore in its satrapies of Gandhāra and Sindh, scribes of Babylonian culture writing in aramaic. Their reality is fully confirmed by the creation, in North-West India, of an aramaic transcription of the Indian language, a transcription made not in accordance with a summary notation of words following their consonantic frame-work, this being the principle of the Semitic alphabet, but in accordance with the learned phonological principles of Indian grammarians.⁴ We can even specifically state that probably these grammarians belonged to the school of Pāṇini. In fact this author whose date, unfortunately uncertain, seems to be in the fifth century B.C., belonged to Śalātura¹ in Gandhāra. He must have been, then, a subject of the Achaemenids, if he did live in the fifth century B.C., because the latter ruled over Gandhāra approximately from the middle of the sixth century, during the reign of Cyrus², up to the end of the fourth century B.C., at the time of the conquest of Alexander.